Leaders To Learn Street Life

They're a fixture in downtown Allentown -- street people loitering on Hamilton Mall.

Some are homeless, others are mentally and emotionally troubled. Some are hard-luck stories; people who have fallen through the cracks for one reason or another.

Theirs is a different world, one defined by disillusionment, loneliness and poverty.

But beneath each of those often unkempt exteriors, there's a real person.

And, some social workers believe, community leaders would have a different perspective of street people if they really got to know them.

Under a new program organized by Lehigh County Conference of Churches, leaders in the public and private sectors will be offered a chance to venture into the world of the disadvantaged -- for a brief time, anyway.

Called Urban Realities, the program brings together in face-to-face situations the makers of public policy and those often most affected by it.

They'll chat in the lounge at Daybreak, an Allentown drop-in center. They'll share a meal in the soup kitchen at St. James AME Zion Church in Allentown. And, hopefully, they'll come away understanding each other a little better.

"We hope that people will get a better understanding of the realities of city life," said Maxine Bender, who designed and coordinated Urban Realities.

Among those realities, Bender said, is the emergence of the "new poor." With the economy in recession, working families with marginal earnings are slipping into poverty as businesses cut back and unemployment grows.

"There are a lot of children, young parents and families who have never been poor before," said Bender, who is in the social relations department at Lehigh University.

Bender, who founded Daybreak and was its director until 1984, was asked by the Conference of Churches to put together the program. She said it is to be organized in two sessions at Alliance Hall, the city's new social services center at 6th & Chew streets.

The first session, 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Feb. 13, will feature lectures on poverty, crime and social deviation by professors from Lehigh University, Muhlenberg College and Cedar Crest College.

Allentown Mayor Joseph Daddona and a representative from the city Police Department will talk about crime prevention.

The second session, 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Feb. 18, will take a more innovative approach. In workshop style, participants will engage in a problem-solving exercise that asks them to make ends meet on the income of a person with a minimum-wage job, a welfare recipient or retired person living on a fixed income.

Participants will be assigned an income -- $4.25-an-hour, for example -- and asked to prepare a family budget. That includes looking through the want ads to find a place to live, figuring out how much to spend on food, and setting something aside for clothing.

Bender hopes the exercise will underscore just how difficult life is for the economically disadvantaged -- often victims of forces beyond their control. As director of Daybreak, she said, it was not unusual to see families being evicted from their apartments because a government check arrived late.

"People often blame the victims," Bender said. "I want them to start looking at the system."

About 40 people, mostly community leaders, have been invited to the initial two-day program. They're being asked to pay $100 to get the program off the ground.

If the pilot program is successful, Urban Realities will be offered several times a year to anyone who wishes to attend.

In addition to the conference of churches, the initial program is being funded by grants from Allentown Downtown Improvement District Association and Allentown's Urban Observatory, a funding arm of the city.

Sharon J. Stabinski of the city's intergovernmental office, said the intent is to raise the level of consciousness among people who work and shop in the city.

"If Allentown has changed in the last 20 years, so has the rest of urban America," she said. "It's time to educate the public who work and shop (in downtown Allentown) to what the realities are."

Urban Realities is the first program of its kind held in Alliance Hall, which will get its first tenants in the next few weeks. Daybreak, which has been at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 8th and Walnut streets, since its founding in 1979, will move to Alliance Hall on Feb. 1.